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Oyster Pie
Line a deep pie-dish with puff-paste; dredge with flour, pour in one pint oysters, season well with bits of butter, salt and pepper, and sprinkle flour over; pour on some of the oyster-liquor, and cover with a crust having an opening in the center to allow the steam to escape.
Or, line the pie-dish half way up with good pie-crust, fill the dish with pieces of stale bread, place a cover of paste over this, and bake about twenty minutes in a brisk oven. Take off crust, have ready some oysters prepared as for patties, fill the pie with them, and replace the crust and serve at once; or line dish with a good puff-paste, place an extra layer around the edge, and bake in a brisk oven; fill with oysters, season with pepper, salt, and one table-spoon butter, sprinkle slightly with flour, and cover with a thin crust of paste; bake quickly; when the top crust is done, the pie will be ready to take up. Serve promptly, as the crust quickly absorbs the gravy. Some like this cold for picnics or traveling. - Mrs. Carrie Beck.
Three methods are packed into one paragraph here: a straight raw-filled double-crust pie, a blind-baked shell filled with cooked oysters, and a hybrid. The second is the safest bet for texture, because it keeps the oysters out of the oven almost entirely.
- The hinge: oysters cook in minutesShucked oysters are done when their edges ruffle, roughly 2-3 minutes in their own liquor. Anything approaching a full bake shrinks them to rubber and floods the crust with expelled liquid; the stale-bread method offered here sidesteps that by keeping them out of the oven.
- "A brisk oven"Read this as roughly 400-425F. It is hot enough to set and colour puff paste quickly, which is the whole point when the filling wants almost no cooking time.
- A pint of oystersThat is 16 fl oz of shucked oysters with their liquor, roughly 20-25 medium oysters, enough for a deep dish of about 9 inches. Buy them shucked in a tub if you can; you want the liquor, so do not drain it away.
- Stale bread as pie weightsThe second method is blind-baking by another route. Pieces of stale bread hold the shape of the shell under a paste lid; ceramic weights or dried beans on parchment do the same job. Per the recipe, the paste cover is lifted off, the bread discarded, and the cover replaced over the oysters.
- "Oysters prepared as for patties"Elsewhere in books of this period that means oysters simmered briefly in their liquor with butter, seasoning and a little flour or cream until just plump and lightly thickened. It is a quick stew, not a long-cooked filling.
- Dredging with flourThe flour scattered over the oysters and under them is the only thickener. Oysters give up a surprising amount of water, so about 2 tablespoons total for a pint keeps the gravy from running thin, but it will never be a stiff filling.
- Puff pasteAll-butter frozen puff pastry is a fair substitute and behaves better than most home-made rough puff in a wet pie. Let the base sheet chill hard before filling to slow the sogging the recipe itself warns about.
- Yield and servingA 9-inch pie serves four to six. "Serve promptly" is not decorative advice; the recipe itself notes that the crust quickly absorbs the gravy, and the bottom will soften fast.
- The picnic suggestionCooked shellfish in pastry held at ambient temperature for hours is a modern food-safety problem, whatever the Victorians did. If you want it cold, chill it quickly and keep it below 40F until it is eaten.
Oyster pie belongs to the era when oysters were cheap protein rather than a luxury: through much of the nineteenth century the Chesapeake and, later, Gulf beds supplied barrels of shucked oysters that travelled inland by rail and canal packed in ice, and American cookbooks of the 1870s and 80s treat a pint of them as casually as a pint of milk. The Dixie Cook-Book, like its northern counterpart Buckeye Cookery, gathers contributions signed by name, and Mrs. Carrie Beck's entry is typical of the genre in cramming several household variations into a single unbroken paragraph rather than choosing one. The blind-baked version, with its shell propped up by stale bread and filled at the last moment, looks like a practical workaround for two familiar problems -- a sodden crust and toughened oysters -- baking the pastry and the shellfish separately and marrying them at the table.